Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  Newfoundland became in comparative terms rich, prosperous, and now content to have been fully confederated with wise and prescient Canada. Its population was now universally happy, as the silver cod leaped in torrents out of the nearby Canadian ocean. Suddenly the old and much-maligned Newfie was being seen as an altogether different creature, now an admirable fellow with a fine work ethic and a newborn entrepreneurial spirit; and instead of endless miles of pine trees and sorry little centers of backwardness, Newfoundland found itself transformed, with brand-new seafood processing plants and enormous trucking operations and the opening of legions of marketing companies. This was now the face of modern, rich, better-late-than-never Newfoundland, the inhabitants suddenly being seen as a people blessed by good fortune. Someone joked that the new provincial motto should be “In Cod We Trust.” An unstoppable juggernaut had been set in motion, and it seemed for a few heady years as if nothing could halt it.

  But then the numbers started to decline. Early in the 1990s scientists began to publicize new figures showing that the number of cod being caught on the Banks was decreasing savagely, and that the number of cod that were spawning—a critical figure for the future—was going down as swiftly as a punctured balloon. The government, aware of the economic boom it had helped create for Newfoundland, tried to keep on smiling, telling all who would listen that all was well. In 1992 its own marine scientists, those who had gotten the numbers so badly wrong a decade before, suddenly sensed the consequences of their errors and suggested limiting the annual catch to no more than 125,000 tons. Politics then got in the way: ministers tried to placate the juggernaut by ignoring the figures and setting their own target at almost twice the level: 235,000 tons. Even this they saw as politically risky; officials had to explain that though the new suggested level might be a long way down from the wonderful 810,000 tons that had been caught back in 1968, it was actually no more than a measured reduction, a figure both sensible and prudent.

  But far from being sensible and prudent, it was actually quite irrelevant—for during that early fishing season there came grim and unanticipated news from the sea: that try as they might, Newfoundland fishermen all of a sudden couldn’t catch anywhere close to even a tenth of that tonnage of fish. And then it dawned: something terrible and unimaginable had happened. The cod, quite simply, had run out.

  The trawlers went out, dropped their nets and cranked open the mouths, dragged for their allotted hours through the fishing ground, and pulled everything back up—and discovered that the trawls were coming up empty. The inshore fishermen sailed their little boats around inside the twelve-mile limit, baited and dropped their lines over the well-known fishing holes—and watched in dismay as their hooks came back up, clean and shiny and quite lacking in cod.

  All of a sudden the truth hit everyone square on in the face. Everything that had taken place since that two-hundred-mile limit had been put in place and the foreigners had been thrown out was shown to have been no more than a wild party, with shots and snorts of unyieldingly bad numbers leading inevitably to the partygoers suffering all the symptoms of a really bad trip. It was a party that came to a crashing end much too soon, and the hangover started the moment the shutters came down.

  And so the government, entirely stunned, had no option. It closed down the fishery. In June 1992, almost five centuries after John Cabot had told of a corner of the sea brimming with the most beautiful and edible of ocean fish, all of them had been caught by man, and the sea had been rendered quite barren. It was said Newfoundland’s waters had maybe 1.5 million tons of spawning cod; now those remaining in the bays amounted to perhaps sixty thousand tons—essentially nothing. The seas are now just empty. The Grand Banks is now an ex-cod fishery.

  And thus it has remained ever since. There have been experiments to restart the fishery, but they all eventually sputtered out. And as I soon found when I drove up along the Bonavista peninsula, stopping at outports such as Catalina, Port Rexton, Newman’s Cove, Trinity, and the northerly town of Bonavista itself, where John Cabot’s statue stands gazing out to sea—small amounts of cod can still be found in the bays and inlets all around. But fishermen are absolutely forbidden to take them—anyone caught with a codfish will be slapped with a heavy government fine. Some argue that allowing a catch of one ton per fisherman each year might make sense—but the government, perhaps in embarrassed recompense for having made all too many mistakes in the past, refuses.

  Some of the processing plants have closed, or now work short shifts with such other fish as can be found and legally taken; some thirty thousand Newfoundlanders have been put out of work. There was a lassitude, a terrible sadness to the place—shuttered shops, boarded-up factories, padlocks on chain-link fences around plants that used to bustle with workers.

  Blame for the collapse of the cod fishery is spread around liberally. Some in government blame the warming weather, which they admit no one can do anything about; others assert that the ever-hungry harp seal eats spawning cod, and since politicians can do something about that, many urge the eradication or culling of the harp seal colonies. Inshore fishermen blame the trawlers and the statisticians. Offshore fishermen are angry with the government for snuffing out their livelihood and offering them little in return—even though unemployment insurance payments in Newfoundland are generous, and critics suggest that the fishing industry in this corner of the Atlantic is all too generously subsidized and instead should be allowed to stand or fail alone.

  But these arguments are all trivial compared with the one reality: that not so very long ago the northwest Atlantic Ocean yielded up a marvelous bounty—and mankind’s greed and a fatal propensity for short-term thinking caused that bounty to disappear, most likely forever. An entire shoreside community has fallen victim, too. Whether that is the truly great tragedy, or whether the decimation of the population of cod on the Grand Banks is the matter for greater grief, is a question that goes to the heart of our relationship with the seas around us.

  John Culliney, a marine biologist working in Hawaii, once remarked that the oceans, “the planet’s last great living wilderness,” perhaps present a frontier where man had “his last chance to prove himself a rational species.” Here off Newfoundland, mankind’s apparently utter dereliction of duty toward stewardship of the Atlantic suggests little reason for optimism.

  5. SOUTH

  And yet in the far south Atlantic, matters appear to be in rather better shape. The fishery created in 1993 in a huge area of British-administered sea around the island groups of South Georgia and South Sandwich—its 850,000 square miles making it the largest remaining part of what was once the formidably grand British Empire—is currently one of the most policed and efficient in the world. Most of the Chilean sea bass to be found on northern restaurant menus comes from there, most of it certified approvingly by the world’s fish protection organizations.

  In truth, like most people I had long been unaware of the simple existence of this body of British-run sea. At least that was the case until one February day in the early 1990s, when I had a most unexpected encounter, and heard tell a revelation of a most curious string of circumstances. But a little background is necessary.

  In my university days in the 1960s, I briefly shared rooms with an exceptionally bright young man named Craig, who took a degree in classical Persian, achieving what by all accounts was a stellar first-class mark. He was promptly recruited by the British Foreign Office as a diplomat—and maybe given other duties by the clandestine services, too. He was sent, not unsurprisingly considering his linguistic skills, to various of Her Majesty’s legations dotted around Southwest Asia. We remained friends, and from time to time I received letters and cards telling of his postings in places like Amman, Jeddah, Jerusalem, and Tehran. He told me once that he reasonably expected that, providing he did not blot his copybook, he could end up as British ambassador to Iran and cap his career with all the honors and decorations that so senior a British diplomat would likely accrue. I think I last heard
from him in the mid-1980s, when he was in a branch of the Foreign Office that dealt with Palestine: his career seemed then to be entirely on track.

  But then came one cloudless summer morning in February thirty years later, when, on a Russian cargo ship, I was steaming into the approaches to Port Stanley, the capital and main harbor for the Falkland Islands. I was on the bridge and by curious chance heard a call on the VHF radio’s Channel 16, asking if I happened to be available.

  The deputy governor of the Falkland Islands presents his compliments, squawked the caller—and would I care to join him for luncheon? Naturally I said yes, though I had not the faintest inkling of who either the governor or his deputy might be. Moments later a small launch appeared, manned by a pair of soldiers; they tied up by the ship’s gangway, saluted me aboard, and we sped back to land, the colonial flag streaming behind us in the breeze.

  It was Craig who was waiting at the quayside. He was heavily bearded now, looking a little older than I remembered, but he was as warm and welcoming as always. We strolled off to his government-reserved table at the Upland Goose, the small hotel made briefly infamous during the Falklands war ten years before, and we ate a lunch that, inevitably, considering this was the sheep-rich Falkland Islands, had been composed around one of the hundred known variations on the theme of roast mutton. We then ordered coffee and brandies, went out into the garden, and sat in the watery South Atlantic sunshine to reminisce. It was then that I asked the obvious question—except that Craig stopped me, holding up his hand.

  He knew it was bound to come up, he said. He knew what I would want to ask. What on earth is this man, a Persian scholar and Farsi speaker, someone with a glittering diplomatic career so firmly in his sights, now doing in a place like this? We both were more than a little embarrassed. But Craig said he had prepared himself for one day meeting his old friends, and had decided that if he ever did, it would be best to tell the truth.

  It turned out that some years before the office had posted him to the embassy in Rangoon. He was to be Head of Chancery, a senior position from which he would be groomed—even in a mission so far away from his normal patch—for what was looking now as his all-but-inevitable ascent to diplomatic stardom. Everything was entirely on course—except that Craig, who by then was in his late forties and still unmarried, proceeded to become involved with a similarly middle-aged and single Burmese woman. In normal circumstances this would scarcely have mattered—but it so happened that Britain’s then ambassador to Burma turned out to have a deeply felt opposition to any of his staff entering into relationships with what he called “the natives.”

  A formal letter was then written to London requesting Craig’s removal—and since it was a complaint from a head of mission, London was duty bound to take notice. So the poor man returned home, there to commence a spiral of absolute career destruction. There were postings now to such overlooked and in those days nonrelevant offices as Luanda, Mogadishu, and Ascension Island. “And now this,” he said, and rather sheepishly handed over a card from his wallet. It was covered with tightly packed script.

  There was the familiar lordly emblem of British government service, then his name, and then his title—a classic illustration of the axiom that the longer the title, the less enviable the job. He was indeed HM Deputy Governor of the Falkland Islands and Dependencies, as the radio message had said, but in addition he was Assistant Commissioner and Director of the Fisheries of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

  But it was his reaction that I then found most surprising. “I’m the first director, the first one ever,” he declared, rather proudly. “And you know what? You’d think I’d be bitter and angry at what happened—but it is actually quite the reverse. I am completely loving it. This, down here, is just the purest paradise.” And he then proceeded to tell, breathlessly, how the diplomatic service these days was primarily devoted to such dull matters as trade—but down here, he was living entirely out in the clear, cold, endlessly fresh air; he had access to an official boat; he was able to travel to some of the most spectacular island scenery in the world; he had come to know the location of the best breeding grounds for such exotic creatures as wandering albatrosses, right whales, and countless kinds of penguins. He was never compelled to wear a suit; he seemed to encounter only people who were fascinating, obsessed, passionate, and adventurous; and was currently able to help create one of the best-run fisheries on the planet.

  “Five years ago I wouldn’t have known one end of a fish from another. I couldn’t tell a krill from a kangaroo. I lived in offices. I went to endless policy meetings. I fretted endlessly about what the London office might think. But now every single aspect of my job has changed. I’m still paid reasonably well. I am still a British diplomat. Burma, for all the short-term misery it caused, ended up doing me a big favor. It got me sent here. And these past two years in the South Atlantic have turned me into one happy, happy man.”

  I could surely see it. He was quite radiant with pleasure, brimming with delight. He still wrote in Farsi and had a collection of Persian classics in his study. He would always love that part of the world. But now he had found something very different, and found it just as entrancing. Had he stayed on in the South Atlantic, he would no doubt have remained a happy and fulfilled man. But the truth is more somber: he fell ill only a few weeks after our unexpected Falkland Islands encounter, was brought back to England by air, and died not long afterward. We buried him in a village in Rutland, on a blustery March day.

  His Burmese girlfriend, who had moved to London and with whom I was in touch for many subsequent years, wrote in the late 1990s to say Craig would have been gratified to know what he and his successors had achieved in the South Atlantic. When she lived in Rangoon she had, as she cheerfully put it, little enough interest in fish—the Burmese had other matters of deeper concern. But in due course, and through her brief life with my old friend, she had also become entirely fascinated with the doings of the sea, and now a total convert, she championed the sanctity of the oceans with a huge enthusiasm.

  • • •

  The South Georgia and South Sandwich fishery has a reputation very different from that of the fishery eight thousand miles away to the north in the selfsame ocean, off Newfoundland. The Grand Banks may be ill-famed as a world-class fishing catastrophe, a marine monument to greed and carelessness, but the managed waters midway between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope have in recent years become one of the great environmental success stories of the world, a story of caution, restraint, responsible solicitude—and of relentless patrolling by big ships, with guns.

  Yet only in recent years. Caution, restraint, and solicitude were words seldom traditionally applied to the creatures that live in the waters off South Georgia. Right up until the 1980s the harvesting of fur seals, elephant seals, penguins, sperm whales, and right whales was an immense and highly profitable industry, and had been almost from the very moment Captain Cook found the “wretched, horrid and savage” island of South Georgia in the late eighteenth century. Horrid or not, by 1912 the inhospitable, entirely glaciated main island sported no fewer than six enormous whaling factories,82 and the decimation of whale populations—the humpback, most notably—became an almost unstoppable phenomenon. British and Norwegian whalers processed more than thirty thousand blue whales in one year, 1929. Now these majestic and gently amiable creatures, the largest animals on earth, are reduced to a population of less than two thousand.

  The British jurisdiction over the islands might eventually have helped curb some of the greater excesses of destruction—except that by 1925 factory ships had been invented, and for the next sixty years there developed a pelagic industry over which no one, however well intentioned, had any jurisdiction at all—and so Russian, East German, Korean, and Japanese ships began a free-for-all in the South Atlantic that resulted in the near-total demolition of many of the region’s more fragile species, fish and cetaceans alike.

  Yet this mayhem—publicized by groups
of ever-more-vocal marine environmental bodies, who capitalized on the widespread public sympathy for the fate of the southern ocean whales—did in time prompt the British government, particularly in the aftermath of the Falklands War of 1982, to set about changing the rules. By the late 1980s London had decided to provide the organization and manpower to try to make sure that whatever fish were to be taken in future, at least from waters over which it had authority, would be taken sensibly and with great caution. Whaling, sealing, and penguin hunting were banned; it fell then to London to make sure that the fish with which the southern seas teemed—some of the local species existing in almost as great an abundance as the cod once had in the seas off Newfoundland—were never to be put similarly at risk.

  The array of creatures in the southern Atlantic is rather different from the populations in the north. There is, for example, an abundance of krill, the tiny shrimplike creature eaten by baleen whales and still much favored by Russian, Ukrainian, and Japanese fishing fleets. It is either canned, made into paste, or sold as frozen blocks for the feeding of livestock, or else it is disguised and sold to humans, mostly unawares. There is the icefish and the rock cod, both of which flourished off South Georgia but were fished to near extinction by Eastern Bloc trawlers in the early 1980s. And there is the Patagonian toothfish, which for some reason escaped the notice of the Russians and the East Germans—until, that is, about 1988. That was shortly after this rather large (up to seven feet long), long-living (a toothfish can live to fifty), exceptionally ugly, and exceptionally tasty fish was rebranded, given the newly invented name of Chilean sea bass, and began to find itself appearing on the menus of white-linen fish restaurants in North America and Europe.